Sky Preps for Solana Expansion

The Sky Ecosystem is preparing for a potential expansion to Solana, as the protocol’s co-founder, Rune Christensen, proposes a short-term crosschain move to the third largest Layer 1 network by total value locked (TVL).

Christiansen posted the proposal to the Sky (formerly MakerDAO) forum on Sept. 20 and unveiled the potential move at the Solana Breakpoint conference.

Through Maker’s rebrand to Sky in August, Sky’s USDS stablecoin is now integrated throughout Ethereum, and in order to “keep the momentum going,” Christiansen is proposing a quick expansion to Solana, bringing SKY, USDS, and sUSDS to the chain through the Wormhole bridge.

A move to Solana may also include a temporary SKY token incentive program built in conjunction with both the Sky community and the Solana DeFi community. Such a program could boost the adoption of SKY, USDS, and sUSDS within existing Solana DeFi protocols.

In the proposal, Rune said, “Two key things that must be incentivized before SkyLink is ready are USDS/USDC liquidity and USDS/sUSDS liquidity, so that USDS can have a near-native experience on Solana. The maximum limit of SKY tokens available for this incentive program will be 2 million SKY tokens per week.”

Sky is the sixth largest DeFi protocol by TVL with $5.5 billion, according to DeFiLlama, and a move to Solana would be the lending protocol’s first venture outside of the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) ecosystem.

Frankendancer and Firedancer Upgrades

In other Solana news, Jump Crypto’s Frankendancer client is live on mainnet, and the long-awaited Firedancer upgrade is live on testnet. Jump CSO Kevin Bowers revealed the news at Breakpoint on Sept 20.

Frankendancer, a precursor to Firedancer, also demonstrated a staggering one million transactions per second (TPS) on a globally distributed 100-node cluster.

Firedancer, which is now live on testnet, is a new validator client built by Jump, which is expected to further “networking throughput, resilience, and efficiency.” The project was first announced in August 2022 and will implement an entirely new codebase.